"You are curious about me," he observed.
"I am," admitted Pete, playing up to him. "Very."
"I puzzle you," Bane added, with greater self-satisfaction.
"I don't make you out at all," confessed Pete, readily.
Bane referred to me and I played Pete's effective string.
"You're absolutely new to me," I said.
Bane firmly closed the door behind him. "It is because you never met before a man completely sane."
"That's it?" inquired Pete, as though speculating on it.
"That's it. It may prove that it was worth while to give you a chance to see it."
Evidently this was an allusion to Selby and Kent who had not been endowed with our opportunity. I did not concede that ours had come completely as a gratuitous act on the part of Bane. Pete undoubtedly also disputed this; but he decided not to argue the point at present; and I did not. Pete continued to dress.
"You fly," said Bane to Pete, "well. Not particularly this morning; but you jumped fast after you were hit. Your record is good, especially in the fog and mist and by night without bearings. Yours," he approved me, "Is fairly good under those conditions. I can use a couple of pilots who are navigators, too. The chief trouble in taking you on will be the element of time."
"Time?" inquired Pete. "You mean time to learn your particular type of flying?"
"No," said Bane. "You can pick that up. The trouble is the time it will take to cure you of the idiotic delusions of conduct and duty which have been bred into you. I know what they are; I had them once. If my father had not been killed, he might have brought me up in them and fastened them on me, too. My father was murdered when I was five."
"Five?" asked Pete, as Bane had emphasized it.
"Fortunately a particularly impressionable age, good for the first planting of the seeds of sanity. My father was murdered, I mentioned to you."
"Yes," said Pete, attentively.
"He was shot down, in cold blood. I happened to see it. My mother and I were with him; we were in an automobile. He did not raise his hands at the order of two young men who stopped the car; he had an idea of defending my mother from consequences other than robbery. So they shot him.
"Later, in connection with some other accident, the police picked them up. My mother identified them and they were brought to one of the farcical mummery shows called a trial by jury. I attended the trial. The prosecution considered it advisable; it would help to turn sympathy away from the prisoners to my mother and me. The plan, however, did not succeed. Sympathy for the prisoners prevailed; the public wept and prayed for them; the jury acquitted them positively amid cheers.
"It was a tremendous experience for me; for I had seen those men kill my father; and then I had seen everyone else in the courtroom cry for joy and cheer when they were freed.
"Still my mother, loyal woman, set herself to educate me to the ordinary, idiotic delusions regarding conduct. You follow me?"
"Perfectly," said Pete, who was dressed now. He sat on the edge of a bed.
I nodded when Bane referred to me.
He remained standing near the door; his hands, I saw, clenched; he quivered. The thing which he told us was overwhelming to him.
"My mother and I were what people call 'left alone' in the world. She took a position to support herself and me. Naturally there grew between us ties of the sort which people call exceptionally close.
"She was a beautiful, gentle woman. One evening, when she was on the street alone, a man seized her; she was saved by a passerby and the man caught.
"He had an outrageous record—a record people pretend to consider outrageous. He had committed habitually the most shocking crimes. Of course, people do not actually condemn what they call crimes—except when the crimes endanger themselves. They admire the man they call criminal. They admired this man and proved it. They knew what he had been doing; and he was free.
"To be sure, the police put up a pretense at not knowing where he was; that was a part of the buffoonery. Now that he was handed over to the law, it had to take its course; and in this case, not even a jury could free him. He was senienced to life imprisonment.
"Of course, being what is called a criminal, he had far more political influence than a lawabiding fool. He was a member of an organization useful to a prominent and powerful politician who had, in his debt, the governor of the state. So the prisoner remained in the penitentiary only long enough to drop, for a while, from public notice; then the governor pardoned him, secretly.
"Immediately he sought my mother again; and killed her. I found her.
"You will excuse so much personal feelings; but I am attempting, Logan and Carrick, to lead you with as little loss of time as possible into the state of sanity which I have attained. I appreciate the difficulties under which you labor; for even yet, after my mother was killed, I clung to some of the rags of the delusions about conduct to which people pretend.
"The re-election of that governor cured me. For, in face of the facts published before all the people, they re-elected him by a tremendous and triumphant majority.
"That night, I stood in the street, seeing figures of his popular vote flashed on the screen from a newspaper office and hearing the people cheer and cheer, as they had cheered when the murderers of my father were acquitted. I remember feeling that at last all rubbish about abiding by the law was cleared from my brain; I turned against those cheering people about me; I struck at them and tried to stop them. Having only my hands, then, they overcame me; and I let them think I was quieted. Crazy, someone called me. The fact was, on that night I became completely sane."
Bane lified his head with the sinews in his throat astrain; his strong shoulders stiffened. I glanced, once, at his hands and saw them clenched white at his side.
"I have something more than my fists now," he continued. "I can strike them as and when I please; and they can do nothing whatever about it."
He shook, for a few seconds, like a man with a chill; suddenly he relaxed, smiled mirthlessly and looked calmly at us.
"Toss me a cigarette," he requested Pete, who picked one from a stand and handed it over. Pete struck a match, lit Bane's cigarette and one for himself. I, being a third, struck my own match.
"The airplane makes it so easy to do to them whatever one wants," Bane continued, in a voice calm from contempt. "So easy to have one's way with them.
"Here they are by millions all about me," he gestured in a circle beyond the hills, "millions of people busy heaping up accumulations of wealth and property, dearer to them than life itself, and which they can not possibly defend from me. Nor can they defend themselves, if I choose to kill them.
"It is amusing—is it not?—how society organizes and over-organizes and superorganizes itself to make an instrument which puts the whole organization absolutely at the mercy of a man like me.
"When they developed the automobile, they almost destroyed themselves; for they put it in the power of a few men, with nerve and imagination, to strike in sudden bold raids and rob and kill them at pleasure and to laugh at pursuit.
"With the greatest difficulty, society doubled and quadrupled its police force and hired and trained highway officers and special guards in their cities in an attempt to make society safe from the few—only very few men, indeed—operating against it in automobiles; but society, as an organized structure, began to stagger. Then it went on and provided the airplane, putting a hundred times, a thousand times the power in the hands of—me.
"The childish organization of cheering sheep—which composes organized society and which found such difficulty in defending itself from the popping pistols of men scurrying through the streets in automobiles—can not possibly defend itself against men armed with ton bombs of TNT and flying in the sky.
"Society, as we know it, doomed itself when it invented the airplane—and made a man like me. Society can not possibly survive the airplane—and me.
"I am about to alter the order of things, gentlemen; I am about to take over power and authority in a new way. I am going to show the world something new in domination.
"Of course, I need a few assistants; not many, but a few. I may offer you the opportunity to assist me."
He held his cigarette stub and studied it, critically, not looking at either of us. Suddenly he snapped it away, glanced quickly at Pete and me, turned and left us.
Pete and I stared at each other, in more deadly seriousness than ever before in our lives.
"Ton bombs of TNT he mentioned," Pete said tome. "Two thousand pound bombs of TNT. D'you suppose he has 'em?"
I thought of Bane's airplanes and his workshop across the lake and the indefinite possibility of secret manufactury or of storage in the valleys of these wooded hills.
"Why not?" I replied to Pete.
"There is no why not to him," Pete solemnly admitted to me. "He might have them; I was only thinking, if he has!"